Putin Depicts Russia as a Bulwark Against European Decadence

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin talks to the participants at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

Listen to Russian president Vladimir Putin these days and you’ll hear him depicting Russia as the last bulwark of conservative Christian values against the decadence of the rest of Europe.

Forgetting Christianity and the accompanying excess of political correctness is leading Europe to a deep moral crisis, he argued on Thursday at the annual Valdai Club conference at a lakeside resort north of Moscow. Russia, with its great history, literature and culture, will resist the tide.

After being condemned internationally for promoting legislation that was aimed he said at protecting minors from homosexual propaganda, he suggested same-sex marriages were contributing to Europe’s low birth rate. “Europeans are dying out,” he said. “Same-sex marriages can’t produce children.” Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, wouldn’t be suffering his legal troubles if he’d been homosexual, Mr. Putin joked.

Mr. Putin’s three-hour televised performance—in which he shared the platform with politicians, current and former, from western Europe–is part of an effort that’s been evident in his third term of office to identify himself with Russia’s conservative majority.

It’s frustrating for modernizers in Russia. One former senior official lamented at last year’s Valdai Club meeting that while Russia needed to look outward to grow and diversify its energy-dominated economy, Mr. Putin was staking his political bets on the 80% of Russian people who looked inward and to the past.

One participant at this year’s meeting of a Russian and foreign academics, former politicians and journalists, argued that as Russians increasingly travel the world, they wonder why Russia is falling behind. Even former Soviet republics like Lithuania had raced ahead.

The retort was that most Russians stay firmly at home and it was a mistake to extrapolate from the young citified Muscovites to suggest the rest of the country was influenced by or interested in developments outside.

Only 17% of Russians have passports, a figure that rises to perhaps a quarter in the cities. (Favored destinations are Turkey and then Egypt.)

This division between the major cities and the rest of the country was one repeated theme at the conference, at which which Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin also spoke.

In the largest country on earth, Moscow’s share of the economy grows, its streets suffering nightmarish congestion. Meanwhile, many people in small cities, towns and villages across the country subsist with no knowledge or interest in the outside world and little wish, according to participants, to change their lot.

Yet the debate about how to alter this dominance was as much about how to hold back Moscow as it was about how to inject some dynamism in the rest of the country. One idea was to introduce visas for people from former Soviet central Asian republics, for whom Moscow has become a magnet.

The division between the biggest cities and the rest is only one of Russia’s distinctions: The legacy of empire is complicated. The country is dominated by Russians, but there are hundreds of other ethnic groups, including Tatars and other Turkic peoples, nationalities from the Caucasus. In this way, you may be Rossisky—a citizen of Russia—but not Russky, an ethnic Russian.

Some 77% of Russians identify with Orthodox Christianity, according to a recent poll carried out for the Valdai Club, compared with 6% with Islam. Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish spiritual leaders all addressed the conference

Mr. Putin said Russian nationalists should recognize that “Russia was formed as a multi-ethnic, multinational country.” Russians though could not expect to identify, he said, only with an ethnic group or religion.

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